In which Certain Events that happen to Ian end up as Compelling Words designed to Entertain all Comers.

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The lovely, talented enchantress Bliss Broyard is from New Orleans, and through some of her friends, we got the following story from Lorrie Beth Slonsky (editor of the medical journal The Gurney Gazette) and Larry Bradshaw, two paramedics who got stuck in the French Quarter while attending a convention. What follows is their harrowing journey out of hell, and while it is long, it is so worth the time. Read it now before this makes the email rounds and thus both Lorrie Beth and Larry end up vilified on conservative blogs. I promise, there is no politics here. Just a true story.

I am not surprised. But please remember it was a city and state deal first, national last. Certainly not the best solution but the unfortunate circumstance. Its embarrassing how inept government bureacracies are.
Did you hear about how the chief of police of New Orleans is sending all of his officers to Vegas for vacation? A strapped for cash city that has just suffered a crippling disaster spending gifted dollars on Vegas – ridiculous.
Oh, and the money that the Clinton doled out to N.O. to fix the levees has mysteriously evaporated. That money was a Louisiana/New Orleans govt. responsibility to manage, not a federal one. There are some rumors going about that Bush took the money away from them to pay for the war. NOT true. Hey, I’m not fond of the guy either, but let’s be honest, he doesn’t have that kind of power.
From a liberal independent in Texas.
(btw, Ian, I take issue with you kvetching that it had to be New Orleans that got reamed by the hurricane enema while Dallas sat pretty. What did Dallas do to you?)

Ridiculous. We’d better start preparing for other disasters, and have a plan. But that means civilians can’t be pooh-poohing the possibility, either. Whenever I speak of preparation for antoher attack in the NY/NJ area, I still get the same ‘It’s not gonna happen here, and if it does, we’re doomed anyway’ nonsense.
I think the authors of that piece should cut it down and publish it on the Times Op-Ed, or in Slate or something.

Hard to even form words. Amazing that the ineptitude of our government, big and small, STILL has the ability to surprise me.
One thing though: not be a jerk, but I did see lots of footage of at least the Coast Guard working 18-hour shifts, tirelessly airlifting people out one by one. And what of General Honore, yelling at cops to put down their guns, sent at the 13th hour to attempt some, any order? I am definitely not law enforcement’s biggest fan (in fact, I can’t quite believe I’m writing all this), but when you’ve got cops overwhelmed and devastated enough to kill themselves, I don’t think it’s right to malign the entire police/military effort and call them “heroes”, quote unquote.
Additionally, actual looters, drug addicts with guns, and rapists *were* out there doing bad things. It’s important to recognize that there were folks “foraging” for jewelry, tv’s and iPods, not to mention thieving countless identities.
I don’t mean to belittle the horror that these folks were fortunate enough to live through. I just think, as with everything, it’s important not to become too publicly one-sided. To do so would be a slap in the face to those in law enforcement who did sacrifice and save lives. Just as it’s not right to generalize all those taking food and diapers as looters….or all looters as humanitarians. If we are to learn something from this catastrophe, it is imperative that we try to maintain perspective. Which, I know, is easy to do from my air conditioned job in Chicago.

This just reinforces all the issues that the real Badbob (me) was saying desoite all the shrill language. The “real Matt” has been trying to say same also:
The 1st responders local mayor and NOPD made tactical errors, didn’t follow their own documented plan. The Governor delayed over 24 hrs making a decision on activating and federalizing guard and muilitary units.
All of the above buffoonery literally fed the FEMA loss of situational awareness and further delayed the delivery of aid be it buses, food or water. Hell, even the Red Cross wasn’t allowed to get the Superdome on day two of the flood- Wednesday.
I believe this lady’s account. She has no reason to make anything up as to her movements or observations..
She does get a few DailyKos like zingers in at Bush and the Iraq War but I am getting used to diregarding politics and searching for facts.Ex- Bush photo-op (maybe); Shoot to Kill policy ( never was implemented by NOPD or the state), Guardsman statements (I doubt it)….
B2

Another thing. They like black people. They say there was racism. They must be full of shit!
Everyone knows that if we’d just privatized the weather, none of this would have happened. Here’s hoping the President has the good sense to sell New Orleans to the highest bidder.

Oh, and I know I said I was going to go away, but I don’t keep my word.
I’m a Republican, after all.
“I’m a uniter, not a divider.”
“We’ll keep America safer.”
“We will restore honor and dignity to the White House.”
“Sadam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.”

Simply unbelieveable. This is America? It’s amazing how quickly we can become a 3rd world country.
I was feeling good about myself, because I have a suppy of water and canned foods in my garage that would feed my family for 3 days in case of an earthquake (I live in CA). The Red Cross recommends 1 gallon of water per person, so I have 15 gallons of water out there. However, if you’re out of town, you’re screwed! Clearly, FEMA and the Red Cross cannot help you. I can’t believe that the sheriff took food and water from those people!
Let’s get these people on CNN, or MSNBC or Fox news or something. People need to hear this story! I want to hear how the mayor of NO and “Brownie” respond to this.
Any by the way, why isn’t Laura Bush down there reading library books to small children who have been separated from their parents? Where the hell is she?

*sigh*
The implication that this story was altered by the people who experienced it – because of a “liberal bias” – is so unbelievably sad. To have suffered what they suffered, and then told their story is somehow slightly invalidated because they were progressive rabble-rousers to begin with… man, I hope one of you gets to say that to their faces. I’d bet Lorrie Beth has a good right hook after lifting all those patients onto gurneys.
In other news, whomever is pretending to be badbob – or pretending to be anybody else – stop it. That shit threatens to ruin comments on an anonymous forum such as this. Let badbob express his own opinions and make your judgements with your own name.

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, recognize that if you remain a “capitalist” at ground zero in a hurricane you really are just an asshole.
And last time I checked:
1. cop = working class; sheriff = working class; coast guard = working class; bus driver = working class
2. disaster = situation; ineffectual bureaucracy & politics = an escalating scale from annoyance to outright hazard
3. effectual public servants = heroes
Disasters seem to make irrelevant the distinctions between white and blue collars, unless you plan an doing an inventory accounting during the “liberation” of your Walmarts shelves. I can’t blame them for locking up store prior to the storm, but one of the things we learned in NERT (unfortunate name : Neighborhhod Emergency Response Training) was that the hardwar tools of rescue: such as crowbars, shovels, and hammers, would be readily avaible to us by liberating them from hardware stores. This was told to us by Firemen. No need to stock them in you dinky apartment. No need to panic. But, then that is the purpose of NERT.
Not to be a polyanna but, I’m sure the hell that would be unleashed in the Bay Area (think GUNS; Mission gangs, Oakland, San Jose) after a big quake will make NOLA seem like a cakewalk.
“sending all of his officers to Vegas for vacation?”
I hope they stay at the Venetian, wtf?
Props to http://www.rub-a-dub.blogspot.com/
Medal Candidate
The standards for awarding the Congressional Gold Medal have been falling over the last few decades. I think that there is a young man from New Orleans who did a good thing and deserves the medal. In fact, I thinkby awarding him the medal, Congress could signal that they are going to return to the years of high standards for awarding the medal.
Let’s write to Congress and get him decorated. I think he deserves A Congressional Gold Medal. If not that medal, he should be given the Medal of Freedom. At the least he should receive the Presidential Citizens Medal.
So call your congressman today. Phone#: 202-224-3121
And call the President, too. Phone #: 202-456-1414
Let’s give honor to whom honor is due.

Bob–fuck off. You promised to leave and didn’t. And Ian–do you think the person pretending to be Badbob is ruining the discourse, or is it already ruined by the “real” badbob? It would be one thing if he posted those comments with his real name, with his photo, so that we could call him on his bullshit. If he’s too much of a chicken to stand behind his words, fine. But to have him come in and make fun of the entire discourse and now he’s the part of the community that needs to be protected? That sucks.
Badboob, go start your own blog, with Matt and Chris L etc. Or stop being such a sanctimonious dick.

1. True story? Maybe. Maybe not.
2. Urban legend? Equally reasonable assumption.
3. Story not political? False (but she’s Editor of the Gurney Gazette…oh, and writes for some other magazine that I forgot to mention and that’s not political or anything).
4. The content is clearly political. Point is, one can pretty easily identify authors’ strong political proclivities by the content. I confirmed it afterward with research.
5. Authors’ Pink-Elephant-Omission: Story by EMS workers at a convention in NOLA during massive public health catastrophe. Obviously EMS workers’ story would talk about attempt to volunteer to do EMS work. Oddly, story does not even raise possibility that they would attempt to do EMS work. No explanation.

“Heck I’ll bet them chicks were really in town for a little carpet munching at Southern Decadence”?
Thanks. That really added to the discourse. Now go back to watching “Girls Gone Wild” or whatever the hell else it is you do in between Fox News segments and spare us.

Badbob always manages to say one unbelievably stupid beneath-his-intellect thing every few weeks, but other than that, he (and anyone else, with the possible exception of JBoogie and the occasional troll) can say whatever they want as long as they don’t actually insult anybody personally. It would get pretty boring if they didn’t.
That said, please tear apart any conservative arguments at will like the Gribster just did.

EMTs recount efforts to aid other during horrific tragedy…there are others
STEPPING UP IN THE STORM: Unable to leave New Orleans when Katrina hit, LI EMTs used their medical training to help injured and sick survive…http://www.emsnetwork.org/artman/publish/article_18301.shtml
KATRINA THROUGH THE EYES OF AN EMT by Philipp Meyer
Last Sunday, Philipp Meyer, a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at UT and an EMT, drove all night to New Orleans, arriving there Monday morning during hurricane Katrina. He spent the next 24 hours working with a local police department as an EMT. Below is his account of those days….http://www.emsnetwork.org/artman/publish/article_18408.shtml
WAR ZONE
That’s how three Mason paramedic/firefighters described the scene in New Orleans last week after Hurricane Katrina hit.
And they weren’t talking about the ruined homes and flooded streets. They were talking about what was going on inside the Superdome, where tens of thousands of evacuees, unable to get out of town, were kept for six days without lights, air conditioning, working toilets or enough food and water.
There were fights, desperation, panic and death. It was chaos, they said.
“We don’t ever want to tell people what we saw there,” said Mark Gerano. “There’s no training, no words, no part of the human mind that could really imagine what it was like down there. It was bad, in every sense of the word.”
Gerano and his co-workers, Battalion Chief Vickie Koch and Fire Inspector Mark Guinn, had been attending an EMS conference in New Orleans and were stranded when the evacuation call came and the city shut down.
They went to the Superdome and offered to help with triage for the 500 hospital patients there.
What happened in the next few days was the stuff of nightmares, they said.
“I’m still having dreams about it,” Koch said. “I’ve been doing this for a lot of years and usually I bounce back quickly. I haven’t jumped back yet,” she said.
The medics treated patients in an 8-by-10 room accessible to anyone. They treated spider bites, injuries from assaults and serious medical conditions.
Ill people had no medicine. Diabetics had no insulin.
Dialysis patients were due for treatment that wouldn’t come.
Hungry babies had no formula.
The crew used arm bandages to wipe the sweat from their brows as they frantically handled about 200 patients an hour. They had few supplies. Formula didn’t arrive until the second day – without bottles. Insulin didn’t arrive until the third day. They used pen lights so they could see to change their clothes. They used paper clips to hang IV bags from signs on the walls. Police radios didn’t work. Raw sewage flowed down the hallways…http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050907/NEWS01/509070359/1077/rss02

Another visiting EMT (from NJ) helping out…
On the morning before Katrina hit New Orleans I had made contact with Hilton Security Captain Lucien Fortone to offer my assistance as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), little did I know that a few days later I would have been part of a team of guests and staff that would come together like a family and do so much for so many.
As others came forward to help, we organized into a cohesive unit, developed a plan, and established our own Incident Command Structure. We surveyed the building, considered options and presented our concerns and ideas to the Hilton staff who recognized us as filling a critical need and supported us in helping them and the thousands of other guests and people from the public that were provided shelter and food before, during, and after the storm.
The Hilton staff and corporate structure was amazing and did not waver in their efforts. They made sure people had three hot meals a day, made arrangements for supplies to be brought in when they could and developed a plan to get everyone to safety regardless of whether or not they were paying guests, staff, or simply people of New Orleans that had somehow made it to the Hilton before the storm.
For my experience I was never prouder to be part of and actually lead a team of people in a time of need than I was when I had the honor of taking the helm of our team of guests at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside. No one was bigger than the team, everyone gave what they could and more in energy, ideas, and just plain hard work.http://cms.firehouse.com/content/article/article.jsp?sectionId=55&id=44459

Not even for a moment, Chris M, badbob, and the like- not even for a moment could you acknowledge the horror, the difficulty of this story, of these people? Simply because some parts of this story might paint those you admire in a bad light, you couldn’t take one moment to mourn, one moment to express concern, sympathy, caring, anything? I guess I shouldn’t care, I’ve gone to skimming your comments anyway because it’s the same drivel, over and over, but I was really hopeful- although really doubtful- that just once, one of you would say, “wow. that’s terrible. that’s just terrible.” Instead, you say “urban legend”?
Do you hold doors open for people? Do you see value in kindness? Have you donated anything to alleviate the suffering of this or any other tragedy? Do you *care* about anyone outside of yourselves, or do you simply troll blogs to find folks to attack? Because that is what it sounds like to me. It’s almost as if you are so ready to jump to defend your platform that you don’t take even a moment to consider that maybe, just maybe, every word of this story is true, and that it’s not a political issue, it’s a human suffering issue, and what happened to these people really, really sucked- regardless of who is to blame. You make me sad, and unless you start speaking from a place of kindness, of grounded thought, of respect, I’ll keep skipping your comments. Not that you give a rat’s behind whether or not I read what you have to say. I’m just Ian’s little sister. But I imagine arguments are much less fun when nobody is listening.

michelle, I really think you are mixing my posts with those of some others in a way that’s not quite fair. though i have serious doubts about the version of events presented by Slonsky and Bradshaw, my other posts make it pretty clear things were outrageously bad in NOLA and that it was a horrible tragedy. It was in other places beside NOLA, too. True, I don’t place as much importance as some people on expressing grief and sorrow in a forum that is comprised mainly of people who were not directly affected by Katrina. I did contribute money to Katrina relief and routinely do so for other charities in fairly significant amounts relative to my modest government salary, but believe that talking about ones own giving is to be avoided. I care a great deal about all the good people who are victims or are helping the victims. I am sure you would not be pleased if a good person who was helping Katrina victims was attacked publicly in the media and it turned out that attack was false.

Wow. I’d heard it was bad but this takes the biscuit.
The response of those in power (police, army etc) was terrible. You guys are living in a atmosphere of fear and terror since 9/11 – pretty much imposed by the government through the media. It ain’t healthy – just look at what it’s turning you into.

M.
re- “Not even for a moment, Chris M, badbob, and the like- not even for a moment could you acknowledge the horror, the difficulty of this story, of these people?”
Yes I do M. or I wouldn’t go through the trouble of coming into this hostile territory to get the truth out. I have given several hundred dollars to a couple charities and I have prayed for the victims who didn’t survive. If I was in a situation to travel to help I would. BTW- Thanks for all your efforts.
This one fact tells the story- After surviving a hurricane, my friends brother was flooded out of his house by a broken levee. Time to flood the house to second story- 10 minutes. Think about it just 10 minutes.
re- “Simply because some parts of this story might paint those you admire in a bad light, you couldn’t take one moment to mourn, one moment to express concern, sympathy, caring, anything?”
I feel. I mourn.
However as a retired military man and engineer and non-artist, I cannot let my emotions rue everything I do. I’m from Mars I guess.
“I guess I shouldn’t care, I’ve gone to skimming your comments anyway because it’s the same drivel, over and over, but I was really hopeful- although really doubtful- that just once, one of you would say, “wow. that’s terrible. that’s just terrible.” Instead, you say “urban legend”?”
Who used the term urban ledgend- not I. I stick by the facts I have been trying to put out:
1- 1st responders: mayor/NOPD did not follow their own S.O.P.
2- The NOPD basically fell apart by day 2
3- The Governor of LA was too deliberate and indecisive with the NGOs (Red Cross, SA, etc.) when they were ready to go. She also never mobilized or federalized the National Guard early enough or with enough power to operate.
4- The Lousiana HLS apparatus (totally independent of the federeal HLS dept) made a horredous calculation NOT to allow the NGOs to bring food/water to the Superdome/Civic Center because they only wanted to evacuate those nodes not create a lodgement fo the folks there….
5- FEMA was overwhelmed lost situational; awareness from bad local/state information (see above) and was frozen in place.
Collectively/individually these are the factors that led to this debacle.
That being said howver I do want to say that no other country on earth could have saved as many people as we have, despite the buffoonery.
“Do you hold doors open for people?”
Yes I do. Not just ladies either.
Do you see value in kindness? Have you donated anything to alleviate the suffering of this or any other tragedy? Do you *care* about anyone outside of yourselves, or do you simply troll blogs to find folks to attack?”
I first came to this Blog after Coastopia. I am often entertained and I like the pics. Troll? hardly.
“Because that is what it sounds like to me. It’s almost as if you are so ready to jump to defend your platform that you don’t take even a moment to consider that maybe, just maybe, every word of this story is true, and that it’s not a political issue, it’s a human suffering issue, and what happened to these people really, really sucked- regardless of who is to blame. You make me sad, and unless you start speaking from a place of kindness, of grounded thought, of respect, I’ll keep skipping your comments. Not that you give a rat’s behind whether or not I read what you have to say. I’m just Ian’s little sister. But I imagine arguments are much less fun when nobody is listening.”
Well Little Sister there are a couple factors at work here. You’re very effective to get to the human element and there are folks in here (this blog) who I think have genuine empathy for the tragedy..
On the other Lady M. go back to the beginning of the entries or your brother’s own posts..they went right to the Lowest Common Denominator of politics and hating Bush for the sake of , well, hating Bush.
Actions and facts are what compel me to write the entries I do. Vitriol will be met with with vitriol..sometimes I even try to entertain in a non-PC way.
B2 (the real one)

Why were you attending a conference 2-3 days after the government told you tog et out of the city? Instead of blaming everyone else maybe you should take some personal responsibility for some of the misery you endured.

I believe the account. Why wouldn’t I, when I live in New York City? I saw how things were handled here immediately after 9/11, and even now that it’s been 4 years, there are still bureaucrats and so-called “emergency responders” that create more problems than they ever solve.
Oh, and about that “why didn’t they leave” question…
Here in NYC, ever since 9/11, whenever something happens, the first thing they do is CLOSE all methods of egress from the city (bridges, tunnels, etc.). We are sitting ducks – and as someone posted above, what happened in NOLA would seem like a day at the park compared to what NYC would be like in a similar disaster.
Just imagine – if it was not possible to evacuate a city of 500,000 with three day’s notice, how many would be trapped in a city of 8 MILLION?

I have purposefully avoided watching tv footage because I have two toddlers and when I can’t even fathom the misery and horror, I feel sure they can’t. Everything does not have to become a political issue. Some things, while having a political effect, can be simply true. This is what I believe the case to be here. In a society where capitalism has taken over and is, essentially, god; we have tobacco companies that can addict people to poison, a government that can bug your house and search you (remember the lawmakers are owned by the real government– the corporations), and a city full of desperate and needy due to a natural disaster (how apolitical is a hurricane?) and they can be treated worse than shit. It is maddening. Infuriating. Thanks for posting it.